Miyamoto Suggested A Zelda Title With Super Mario Maker Gameplay, Which Led To The Chamber Dungeons In Link’s Awakening

Earlier this week, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening made its modern HD return on Nintendo Switch. One of the game’s new features is the ‘Chamber Dungeons‘ mode – which lets players construct dungeons using pre-fabricated rooms. If you’ve ever thought that this mode was pretty much the Zelda-infused version of Super Mario Maker, then you wouldn’t be far off the mark!

Recently, IGN interviewed Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma about the new mode, and how it came to be. Interestingly, Aonuma revealed that the Chamber Dungeons mode actually spawned from discussions between him and Mario’s creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Namely, Miyamoto had suggested that Nintendo’s developers try their hand at creating a Zelda game with the same stage-building mechanics as Super Mario Maker and its Switch sequel. This discussion eventually led to the development of the Chamber Dungeons!

You can read the entire excerpt below.

“I talk to Mr. Miyamoto regularly about ‘the next Zelda game,’ and one time, he asked me if I could come up with a game that features Super Mario Maker-like gameplay, but for Zelda. We talked about how a game like this for Zelda would have dungeons, but it’s generally quite difficult to devise the logic needed to solve them. So we gave some thought into a more approachable style of play where you have to think about how to arrange parts that already have a solution to create a single dungeon, instead of allowing players to create complex arrangements like in Super Mario Maker 2, and that’s how we created the Chamber Dungeons for this game.

Given that the Chamber Dungeons feature is based on using rooms that already have a solution, we went looking for examples from existing titles, and found that the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening would be the most suitable, because each room is usually the size of a single screen, and seen from a top-down view this makes their layout easy to understand. A critical part of the Chamber Dungeon gameplay is understanding the original dungeons before arranging your own.”

Talk about revealing! It looks like a ‘Zelda-maker’ game was always under our noses this entire time – albeit with limited customization. It will definitely be interesting to see if Aonuma and the Zelda developers eventually expand on the idea further in the future!

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening launches for Switch on 20 September 2019. You can still pre-order the Steelbook Edition of the game from the NintendoSoup Store, or grab a standalone copy of the game over on Amazon (both options ship worldwide).